Hi Eric, all,
I am used to a certain amount of vitriol on the Apache OO mailing lists, but I
can not leave this standing as is.
eric b wrote:
> Well, the people who know me know I'm always glad and happy to share
> my code, everytime I can. But this is not the first time : previous
> one was about the ARM assembler optimisation in interlock.c for armv7
> + ISA . It was "fixed" (means my name added) after a (friendly)
> discussion with Jani Monoses and Björn Michaelsen.
You are implying there was a "first time" were LibreOffice cleared your name of
your contribtion. This is simply not true. The ARM patch was upstreamed from
Debian Packaging, where it was already cleared of any author information or bug
reference. It had therefore to be assumed to be of Debian origin. If you want
to put any blame, but it there, not on LibreOffice. Once the truth came to
light (IIRC by my Canonical co-worker Jani Monoses hinting you at it, which
does not exactly suggest malicious intend), we very quickly contacted you to
rectify the situation. Ironically, in the process of this, we discovered that
recent gcc versions provide better code themselves, so none of this code is
even used in current releases. As the original ASM code is not even SMP-safe
and all the compilers Ubuntu use provided a better solution, I could have
dumped that patch -- but we left it in for vanilla gcc 4.5 versions (not Ubuntus
fixed one). And we (actually Jani) fixed the original patch, so that it would
be SMP-safe on old, non-Ubuntu compilers. Looking back, I would have loved to
have never touched that patch at all: it created a lot of work and no extra
value for LibreOffice on Ubuntu.
As for the patches lifted from Apache by Thorsten: Complain to the guys who
maintain that nostalgic SCM at Apache to provide more explicit author
information. LibreOffice really cant be blamed if Apache publishes your work in
ways that do not suit you.
To sum it up: There was not even a "first time" -- the people on the
LibreOffice project behaved correctly in both cases.
Best,
Bjoern
See also: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/726529
P.S.: Threadbreaking, because I explicitly had to subscribe for this.